Salt in Her Wounds

Sabine was meant for ballrooms, not brigantines. When a desperate escape from her gilded prison lands her aboard a legendary pirate ship, her world unravels faster than any tapestry her old life once clung to. But the sea doesn't just take, it offers. And in its salt-slicked chaos, she finds Riven: the infamous pirate queen, feared from the archipelagos to the imperial court, silent and scarred, with a past she keeps locked tighter than her brig.

Riven didn't ask for a stowaway. She certainly didn't ask for feelings. Her ship runs on silence, survival, and secrets, and Sabine threatens all three. But as storms close in and old enemies rise from the deep, the two women are drawn together not by fate, but by choice. Rough, stubborn, human choice.

What unfolds is not a fairy tale but a tide-bound tangle of grit, grief, desire, and uncertain hope. From midnight raids and cursed islands to hushed confessions in candlelit cabins, Salt in Her Wounds is a story of women who refuse to be tamed, by kingdoms, by duty, or even by love.

This is a novel for anyone who grew up loving pirate stories but never saw themselves at the helm. For anyone who learned too early that freedom is costly, and for those still willing to pay the price. Here, queerness is not a tragedy but a compass. And the horizon? Always just out of reach, but fiercely, gloriously ours.